The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home

Introduction

Your home is a place of refuge, renewal, and creativity, where you begin and end each day. It is also the primary root of your energy and spirituality. The house witch works to honor and strengthen that sacred space, making it as simple, peaceful, and nourishing as possible.

Unlike green witches who focus on nature-based practices and kitchen witches who concentrate on food and cooking, the house witch explores and uses the magic of the home. While other spiritual paths often look beyond the home to focus on the natural world, the house witch creates a solid and supportive place to work from—a literal (and magical) home base.

In The House Witch, you’ll explore the energies of hearth and home and learn how you can create a spiritual haven for yourself and your loved ones in today’s busy world. Inside these pages you’ll learn how to:

• Locate and enhance your home’s spiritual hearth

• Perform rituals to protect and cleanse your home

• Build a kitchen shrine

• Prepare recipes that blend magic and food

• Master the secrets of the cauldron and the sacred flame

• Bring the ancient house witch practices into modern times

• Produce hearth-based arts and crafts

In essence, the role of the house witch is to serve as a facilitator for the spiritual well-being of herself, her family, and her welcomed guests. Her home is her temple, which she tends in order to keep energy flowing smoothly and freely, as well as to honor the principles she upholds. She seeks to support and nurture her family (and extended community) in both a spiritual and physical fashion. So if you are ready to explore the magic that may be found or created in your home and use it to better your life, then let’s get started.

Chapter 1

A Place to Call Home

IF THERE’S SOMETHING ALL PEOPLE have in common, it’s the need for shelter, nourishment, and a place to call home. That place is somewhere to return to for refuge, renewal, relaxation, and rejuvenation. In this chapter you’ll learn about the concept of home and its place in a spiritual life.

Spirituality comes from within, and the spiritual path or practice you choose gives it context. One of the most common of those contexts is the hearth, the spiritual center of the home. No matter what your current spiritual path is, rooting it in your hearth makes a lot of sense and can nourish the rest of your spiritual life.

Hearthcraft and Home-Based Spirituality

Hearthcraft is a spiritual path rooted in the belief that the home is a place of beauty, power, and protection, a place where people are nurtured and nourished on a spiritual basis as well as a physical and emotional basis. Hearthcraft describes the home-based portion of the spirituality associated with the path of the house witch. It is not kitchen witchcraft, although that can play a role within a house witch’s practice. It is also not green witchcraft, although that, too, can influence and enrich a hearth- and home-based practice.

Hearthcraft argues that spirituality, like many other things, begins at home. It is not enough to attend an out-of-home spiritual gathering at specific intervals; the home itself is an essential element within a nourishing, vibrant, ongoing spiritual practice. Once upon a time organized religion was depended upon to be the source for spiritual fulfillment. With increasing dissatisfaction being felt within organized religious institutions, the relocation of the spiritual focus to the home, either as the central element or a supportive one, makes sense. Honoring the hearth means honoring your origins, where you come from each day, and where you return each night.

Why Hearthcraft?

The word hearth is of Old English origin meaning the floor around a fireplace or the lower part of a furnace where molten metal is collected during the smelting process. Throughout the ages the hearth has come to symbolize domestic comfort and the entire home, perceived as the heart or center of the living space. Therefore, someone who practices hearthcraft is someone whose spiritual practices revolve around the hearth and home, as symbolized by the fireplace and the fire that burns within it.

Perhaps a more familiar term, kitchen witch is used popularly to mean someone who practices magic through cooking, baking, and/or through everyday activity. Hearthcraft differentiates from kitchen witchcraft by primarily emphasizing the spiritual aspect that runs through the practice, as opposed to the primarily magical practice of the kitchen witch. There’s more about kitchen witches later in this chapter.

Hearthcraft, like other aspects of the house witch’s path and other forms of kitchen and green witchcraft, revolves around practicality, with little ritualistic guidelines or necessary formality. Here are some keywords to keep in mind when you think about hearthcraft:

• Simple

• Practical

• Family-related

• Domestic

• Everyday

• Household

Keep It Simple

The practices suggested in this book are based in simplicity. Here the word ritual doesn’t mean something full-blown and complicated; instead, it means an intuitive ceremony or something set apart from everyday action by mindfulness and conscious intent. Also, the word magic means the conscious and directed attempt to effect change by combining and directing energy toward a positive goal. The rituals and magical workings included in this book are only guidelines to give you an idea of how you can structure your own hearth-based spiritual practice.

Why Hearthcraft Is So Special

Hearthcraft functions on a very basic truth:

Living your life is a spiritual act.

Having said that, it can be hard to isolate exactly what constitutes spirituality and, by extension, how to actively support it in the home.

What makes hearthcraft so special is that the principles of it dovetail—in fact, are—the things you do every day in your home. In essence, this book is designed to help you recognize those things and lend awareness to them so that you can appreciate them all the more. It also offers some ideas on how to enhance those everyday actions and objects in order to facilitate or deepen your experience.

What Is Spiritual to You?

Nurturing the spiritual element of the home is key to the path of the hearth-based house witch. How can you do this? The answer depends on how you define spiritual. You’ve already read some basic definitions, but what is crucial to this practice is defining the term for yourself. Think about these questions:

• What constitutes a spiritual experience for you?

• What are the characteristics of a sacred object?

• What elements of an action render it spiritual?

These are huge questions, and the answers will be different for every person who tries to answer them. Attempting to define spiritual can be challenging, frustrating, and faith-testing. You may not be able to say more than I just know when something is spiritual, and that’s fine. In essence when you recognize something as spiritual, you acknowledge that something about it moves you or touches you deeply in a very specific way, evoking certain feelings that may be indefinable.

Focus Your Practice

Once you know what kinds of things you find spiritual, or what kinds of events or actions evoke that response within yourself, then you may have some idea of where to focus in your practice of home-based spirituality and how to identify or establish everyday activities that can support your spirituality, recognizing and using these spiritual moments to reinforce your commitment to making the home a spiritual place. One method of doing this is to use these moments or activities as an opportunity to think about important things (not important as in balancing your checkbook or picking up groceries for dinner but as an issue related to your spirituality); an opportunity to send good thoughts out toward your family, friends, and community; an opportunity to practice a form of walking meditation, where you perform a simple, ongoing action with a clear mind. Perhaps you take a moment to say a prayer or simply open your heart and talk to God in whatever form you envision the Divine, the universe, the spirit of love, or whoever you feel like talking to.

Maintaining healthy spirituality means keeping yourself relaxed, focused, and practicing something. It means keeping the lines of communication open between you and something greater than you. The term practice is often used to describe what one does in respect to one’s spiritual path, and it means physically or intentionally acting upon a theory associated with the path. By actively seeking out or defining spiritual activity, you create the opportunity to develop a deeper connection with the world around you. (Chapter 2 explores sanctity in more depth, especially as it pertains to the home.)

Everyday Things Can Be Magical

There is always a sense that something that is simple cannot possibly be as effective or powerful or useful as something more complicated or difficult. This is an odd human perception. People love to complicate things, possibly in order to have a scapegoat available if they fail. It was too difficult! they can cry. Humankind seems to instinctively eschew responsibility. But taking responsibility for your spiritual practice, working from the heart of your home outward, is a step toward a more rewarding relationship with the world around you.

Everything is, or can be, a magical act. Stirring a pot of soup as you reheat it can be a magical act. So can wiping down the counter, washing the dishes, filling the kettle, and arranging your tea caddy. So how do you make these things magical? Not with secret words or arcane shapes drawn in the air. It isn’t the addition of something that is necessary, so much as a recognition and acknowledgment of something that is already there.

How do you recognize the magic? Try these steps:

• Live in the moment. Being in the moment is harder to do than it sounds. It means not thinking about your next action or the one you just performed, not thinking about how you have to leave in half an hour to pick the kids up from practice or how you have to remember to buy milk on the way home. It means thinking about what you are doing this precise moment instead. Just be. Feel the weight of the jug in your hand; feel the weight shift as you tilt it to pour the milk; hear the sound of the liquid flowing into the glass.

• Be aware of your intent. Awareness is key to most magical working. While you are performing your action, make sure you have a clear expectation of the associated result or energy. Envisioning a clearly defined result is key to success.

• Direct your energy properly. Focus your will and allow it to fill the action you are performing. Poorly directed energy is wasted.

• Focus on an action. It may go without saying that there should be an action upon which to hang your magical work, but for the sake of clarity it’s worth noting that it is better to focus on a single action rather than a series of actions. It is harder to maintain focus over a long period of time, especially if you must change actions along the way.

Remember, hearthcraft is about keeping things simple and focusing on the actual work you are doing in the home. If you feel you need to speak during a moment you define as spiritual or magical working, speak from the heart or use a short prayer or poem that you already know and can apply to several situations. (See Chapter 10 for suggestions about spoken magic and prayers.)

In essence, magic is the art of clearly focusing your will to help create a change or transition of some kind. If you’re familiar with the contemporary practice of magic, particularly in conjunction with your spiritual practice, then you know that certain symbols or objects can help you focus and lend energy to help accomplish that change. If you’re interested in this kind of work as a supplement to your spiritual practice, you should read a book specifically focusing on magic and spellwork, such as my book Power Spellcraft for Life. As this book focuses mainly on maintaining a home-based spiritual practice, there isn’t a lot of magic-based work described here. It does include folk wisdom and home-based tradition, however, which some people may identify or define as magic.

Although many people use the terms house and home interchangeably, there is a difference between them, and each term is used to describe something specific in this book. House refers to the physical dwelling, the four walls and the roof over your head and the address and geographic location of your residence. Home refers to the energy entity created by that physical dwelling, the family that lives in it, and the identity that arises from the interaction between the two.

How does this all tie in to spirituality? Every moment is an opportunity to be in the now, to appreciate the moment and to make it magical. By doing this, you acknowledge that even the simplest of tasks informs your spirit and can nurture your soul. Allowing yourself to be in the moment illustrates how special you are. Life is made of many tiny moments strung together, after all. Opening yourself to the simplest of tasks and allowing them to inspire you with some insight or wisdom, or even a moment of peace, illustrates that the Divine can whisper to you in the oddest of unexpected places. Hearthcraft is about communing with the Divine through everyday tasks, not through complicated formal ritual.

Building Your Spiritual Headquarters

The hearth-based house witch seeks to create and maintain the best possible home atmosphere for family and friends, to support, fuel, and nourish them on both a physical and spiritual level.

A house is a neutral structure, and a home is a living, thriving place that is created by the actions and intentions of the people who live within that house. The home is a sanctuary, a place of security. It is defined by the people who live in it, is created by them, and is keyed to their energy. Energy defines the home in more than one way: it feeds and propels it spiritually and emotionally, but it is also invested in the form of money that sets it up and maintains it. Mortgage payments, rent, furnishings, consumables are all fueled by energy in the form of money, which is earned by an individual through work or other exchange of energy. Emotion, time, and money are all valid forms of energy that go into running a household and home.

The home is where you build a base or headquarters from which you may venture out into the world, and to which you may return at the end of the day. It is a place where you can be yourself, where you can relax and allow the energy you control so tightly outside its walls to flow freely in a protected space. It makes an excellent and very immediate base for a spiritual practice.

Denise Linn, author of Sacred Space, says, Homes are symbolic representations of ourselves, and in fact in a deeper sense are extensions of ourselves. She is absolutely right. On an unconscious level, how you treat your living space can very often give insight into how you perceive yourself. On a more active level, by consciously controlling how you organize and decorate your living space, you can impact your sense of self as well and influence how you feel. Environment affects your emotional, physical, and mental functioning; it makes sense that it affects your spiritual well-being too.

For many of us it’s important to have a room or defined space within the home that is exclusively ours: a bedroom, a corner, an office or reading room. What is often overlooked is a communal area that is equally invested in with conscious awareness and is cared for in the way a private or personal space would be. Communal spaces in a home, such as living rooms, family rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, become an aggregate of the energy of all the people who use them and the activities that take place within them.

Rather than allowing the energy to form willy-nilly without any sort of conscious direction, and living with whatever the result is, it’s wise to take it in hand and guide the energy signature identity. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the idea of how this impacts the spiritual health and well-being of the members of the family as well.

Energy is fluid and always moving, so the result is never permanent. Ongoing maintenance is ideal. And it’s never too late to begin or to work to reverse the energy signature of a communal room that is unwelcoming or uncomfortable in some way.

Maintaining, guiding, and shaping the energy of a communal room is a form of caring for the health and well-being of the people who use it.

Caring for Those Inside Your Home

The practice of hearthcraft presupposes someone to care for, even if it is only yourself or your pets. Family is one of the cornerstones of hearthcraft.

Members of the family (and/or the residents of the home) are active participants in shaping and affecting the energy of the home. They maintain and continually nourish the spiritual element of the home by being active, communicative, loving, and physically present. They provide energy for the house witch to manage, which